It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

There is no “I” in “PvP”

A long time ago, BBB got me a little… Umm pissed off isn’t the right term, because he didn’t piss me off, but he did say something that got me very annoyed.

Now this was in the midst of what is otherwise (as usual) a very good post about the pain of PvP achievements in a world filled with (differing sorts of) PvE.

What got to me (and this is a really bad paraphrase that will make BBB sound worse than he is) was the sentiments that:

PvE is for teams

PvP is for individuals

Teams of PvE players unite to defeat bosses.

Individuals go Chuck Norris to win PvP.

What about PvP (Player vs Player)? How is it any different?

In PvP, it’s all about personal excellence against other living, thinking, reacting and planning opponents.

Real people, fighting against each other and using every trick they can think of, all in a fluid combat environment that requires various Battlefield objectives be met for faction victory.

But whether or not your faction reigns supreme, the focus is entirely on personal accomplishments, on excellence in playing your own character as an individual.

The line may seem to get blurred a bit, because overall success or failure within the Battleground hinges on how many players to a side both kicked individual ass AND were able to work together towards these Battlefield objectives.

At the end of the battle, however, it’s not just win or lose for a side. No, in a PvP Battleground, there is a Leaderboard that pops up which breaks the results of the entire battle down into individual accomplishments.

The leaderboard does show information that relates to team play. Who captured or assaulted flags or towers, etc. But all of the information, including numbers of honorable kills, is clearly presented, by intentional design, to single out and recognize excellence in individual effort. To put things in a ”MVP” perspective.

edit: I need to point out that at the time of his post, he did clarify his position and it wasn’t what “I had read”. Still BBB & I have a long and happy tradition of throwing things at each other and there was also a point to be made to a greater less informed audience. Apologies to BBB for an anger directed at him.

STOP THE ROT!

Everyone KNOWS that PvE is about team cooperation.

Many people THINK that PvP is about 10,15,40,120 individuals doing their own thing.

I want this message to stop right now – this is the reason BGs turn to shit. New and even old players think that “going hero”, playing by themselves wins BGs.

Chuck Norris is a NOOB!

Being a hero loses BGs!

Being a hero loses PvE encounters too!

We have all been in instances & raids where “a” player goes all Chuck Norris and tries to defeat an instance solo.

The Tank charging ahead alone.

The Healer pulling for the Tank.

The DPS, so full of themselves, pulling aggro every fight on every mob, because their DPS is so uber that they could solo single pull the instance with one hand tied behind their back.

Do we approve of this behaviour?

Hell No!

When LFD was introduced, the root of 51% of the QQ was heroes forcing us to play their way, wiping the group and hearthing.

When you put this in a 10 or 25 man PvE environment you get 9 or 24 people screaming for blood and repair money.

Weekend at Bernies

Individuals AFK

Yeah they do.

It’s a nightmare in PvP because sometimes the win goes to the side with the least AFKers.

Of course individuals AFK in PvE as well. Ohhh they might do some damage… White damage… but they aren’t a part of the team.

People HATE Premades!

Battle Grounds are the original 10 man raids. Back when you were dealing with 40 man raids WSG and AB were the mini raids of the future, with AV the 40 man equivalent.

I’ve play the range of Premade to Pug, in both PvE and PvP. 25 man guild raid, guild raid with PuGs to fill the numbers, full PuG raid. The same in PvP, exactly the same.

The issue is that In BGs, Blizzard mechanics (and people’s attitudes) forces a predominance of PuG groups. Not just that, but there isn’t any sophisticated LFD style “select your role” which gives you the perfect balance of classes and roles in BGs.

But PvP Guilds are coming?

Yeah, this has me a bit confused.

The reason it has me confused is that PvP Guilds = Premades and at this point in time Blizzard is actively discourage, nay completely stopping Premades.

You want to run some BGs with your mates… make sure you only have 4 mates, because Blizzard has now limited the the number of people that can join as a group to 5 – half a WSG, a 1/3 of an AB, SotA or EotS, and 1/8th of an AV or IoC.

You can’t even enter the 120 person battleground that is Wintergrasp as a group of any size… well, I guess you can, but you don’t get extra bodies, thus you don’t get the benefits of playing with more of the 120 body pool.

BBB may think we are a bunch of Chuck Norris, but in reality Blizzard has made this so – or at least, removed the ability to prepare and act as a group without certain tricks.

Premade Tricks

The trick, which even Blizzard is trying to stop via changes to interfaces, is to join a premade group. You might have a premade/PvP Guild on your server, but for those of you that don’t there are options such as x-server Battlegroup Premade.

On Bloodlust battlegroup, there are two that know of specifically and I believe there are others (as I have seen similar macros and vent details exchanged).

Military Operation

When you run with groups like this, you realise how ridiculous BBB’s statements are. They are as fine tuned as Guild Raid groups. There is no more “I” in the battleground than there is in a Raid. Yes individuals make important contributions at times, but just as in raids, it is a rare day that a BG is won by an individual. There is an expectation that everyone will play their character correctly, not make stupid mistakes and the group will win.

Occasionally a player will get singled out for top heals or dps – which is no different than in raid, even if you need a 3rd party product to show it for PvE. However this is frustrating, because normally the top DPS got there with top support, the top healer had lots to heal and had covering fire to keep them alive.

There are some BGs where I am top damage or top heals – that isn’t because of me, it’s because of circumstances. Other times I am bottom of the rung.. maybe I volunteered to guard a base that didn’t have any conflict. I could have chased the conflict to increase my numbers, but that would have been against the needs of the team. Does the kiter in a raid, drop the kiting for some uber dps? Does the tank go for the damage meters or stick on the boss?

From my experiences in QQ, anyone that goes Chuck Norris, off doing their own thing will be shown the door. We have commanders, when they tell you where to go, whether you like it or not, you jump, not even wasting the breath to ask “How high?”

Individual Achievements

BBB mentions the recognition of individual efforts and I have already covered the ingame DPS charts (I wonder why they haven’t introduced this to PvE?), but as for BG Achievements, some can be achieved by individual actions, but most call on a group effort – or at least the best way to achieve it is a group effort.

Maybe once again, the fault in Blizzard’s past is that by not providing better BG grouping options. Maybe they designed the achievements based on a system they had let become a “single queue”. Although I missed the early days of BGs and the titles and the constant grind to stay at the top, I have heard of many stories where the BG teams would work towards ensuring a specific person gets to the top. People sacrificed their own honor for the team.

The changes are coming.

Premades will gain some respectability in Cataclysm. In fact it will be the only way to gain the mid-level rewards for PvP. Arena will still give the best, Random BGs the worst, but there will be official premades. This is a good thing, as it will enable people that enjoy PvP, are geared for PvP, to play with a TEAM of others in the BGs.

Unfortunately, this will leave the lower eschelon of BGs where people may not play nice – even though that is the way to win.

I dare say I will be in a server based group, of some description. It wont be a guild – I am already in a guild, but I guess it will be a lose collective of PvP fans. I guess I can dream that Blizzard will introduce some way of belonging to multiple “organisations”.

As for the “I” in team

It carries as much weight as the statement there is no “I” in Team. Of course there is… but, not at the expense of the team.

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42 Responses

You’re right, that is a really bad paraphrase. ;) BBB even says, “overall success or failure within the Battleground hinges on how many players to a side both kicked individual ass AND were able to work together towards these Battlefield objectives.”

I don’t think anybody’s seriously disputing the points you’re making. People cry when they see a BG premade because unless you’re part of another premade, you’ve functionally lost the battleground (and, at least in my battlegroup, will probably be HK-farmed until the timer runs out or you log out). What BBB means is that Blizzard has designed PVE to highlight group accomplishments and PVP to highlight individual accomplishments. Consider the in-game reporting – in PVP you get scorecard full of HKs, damage done, healing done, etc. In PVE you need add-ons to do that; the only default measurement is “did you kill the boss? y/n”, which is a group accomplishment. (It’s also demonstrated by the fact that in battlegrounds, you have an auto-rez – which highlights the importance of the individual, since they want to get you back into the game rather than having to find your corpse.)

There’s also the distinction between an environment where everything’s a very cleverly-programmed AI response versus one where everything’s human interactions – personal decision-making and response times are of paramount importance in the latter, where in the former, others can pick up the slack.

Your points are all quite valid – but I don’t think you’re actually responding to the points that BBB was trying to make. :)

Ohh and I love my BBB… I know he wasn’t hunting down PvP loving Gnomes with his post… but it just stirred a feeling inside me that made me want to shout.

That feeling (my desire to smack the Big Bear on his Butt) subsided over the week following his post, which is why it has taken so long, but we have been teasing each other about the post periodically… so I dragged out the draft and finished it off.

It all comes down to a perception that Battlegrounds CAN or should be played solo rather than as a team. Reading/writing BG chat is as much, if not more important than skills and gear

lol, I know, I even included the quote so you could see how bad it was.

Still, evidence shows that less geared coordinated teams will win over better geared.

My issue really is that too many people think it is an individual’s game, but it isn’t. Unfortunately, the system sets it up to be a solo-in-a-group game.

However, the game comes alive, is won in fact, on team efforts. The squishy healers and dps survive only when healers heal. The team wins when rather than fighting on the roads, they follow the instructions for their group and complete their objectives.

Sure it is player vs. player and the chaos that comes from that, but roles still exist, strategies still exit. One player can’t win it, but a team can.

As for Auto Rez.. the difference between PvE and PvP is that action doesn’t stop, doesn’t wait for you to regroup, rebuff, discuss the strategy. Healers often aren’t out of combat. Without Rez it would be more like Arenas.. last player standing – which is more about individual efforts.

That’s because in your average warsong gulch, 9/10 people are most likely pants on head retarded. Sun tzu himself could not muster the mental strength to deal with, let alone lead that level of stupid. You have people not peeling off the flag carrier, hybrids being useless and not throwing heals to anyone but themselves, people mid fighting and graveyard camping. the list goes on and on.

People don’t hate premades. People hate poorly led premades, just as much as people hate poorly led PuG instances. If your leader knows nothing of the balanced power of base and midfield defense you might as well be Pugging. The problem lies in PvE people doing BGs with the PvE mindset of “tunnelvision until it dies, healers will keep everyone up so it’s not your problem”. Useless rets who only heal themselves and couldn’t find their cleanse button if you drew them a map and personally led them by the hand.

And for your information, going “all chuck norris” isn’t always a bad thing. There’s no I in PvP, but there is one in suicide mission.

“I don’t agree that it is stupid people, rather people that don’t understand that it is a team game, that coordination is as important in battlegrounds as in instances and raids.. more so in fact.”

I might have spoken too soon on “stupid”, “blindly ignorant to class mechanics” would be closer to the point I’m trying to make.

“Battlegrounds are not a solo pursuit, they are a team activity and if you don’t want to act as a team, or don’t understand the rules.. then leave until you do.”

You’re speaking to the guild leader of a PvP guild, battlegrounds are a solo pursuit in the regards that each person has a job to do, for the most part independent of the other groups. Mid field D only needs to worry about helping FC O in the act of slowing down the enemy, and base D only need worry about that. All of this within reason of course.

What is boils down to is a lack of communication, i think you’ll agree with me that when people call out incs and actively respond to threats everything goes a hell of alot smoother.

“What is boils down to is a lack of communication, i think you’ll agree with me that when people call out incs and actively respond to threats everything goes a hell of a lot smoother.”

Totally agree.

In fact that in combination with a strategy is the difference.

I dare say many don’t realize that strategies are just as valid in fast moving PvP situations as they are in PvE situations…

… but the difference is the ability to respond to differing conditions as far away as the other side of the “zone”. This can only be achieved through good communication, whether nothing more than a frantic ping of the map while you fight for your life, or clear troop numbers and movements.

edit: Of course people and roles are assigned in PvE encounters. Who is happy with the Mage that doesn’t decurse or interrupt when required? DPS is important, but if there is an additional role, it must be performed for the good of the whole.

“edit: Of course people and roles are assigned in PvE encounters. Who is happy with the Mage that doesn’t decurse or interrupt when required? DPS is important, but if there is an additional role, it must be performed for the good of the whole.”

most don’t interrupt, it’s a DPS loss. Decursing can be done by the resto druids, so why waste the GCD?

this is the mindset of most players.

People outgear most instances so things become less and less important, it’s a sad state of affairs.

LOL, seriously, I love it when this happens. I piss someone off so much they write a better post about the subject than I did.

Chris nailed my overall opinion, which as he quoted, is “overall success or failure within the Battleground hinges on how many players to a side both kicked individual ass AND were able to work together towards these Battlefield objectives.”

The same applies to any groups PvE pug. You get a bunch of strangers thrown together, and you hope and pray that you get more teamwork than tools in your group. With PvE, you get the added misery that if you meet partial success before the collapse, you get a lockout full of idiots.

To address the gnomage brilliance… I think PvP guilds are a beautiful thing. I think premades are awesome. And I think the success that Gnomer has shown/described in taking the leadership roll in a thrown together PvP battle, directing the flow, getting people to respond and follow those directions, and winning proves that it CAN be done if you walk in with the right attitude.

When I wrote that post, again just as Chris said, the thought behind what I was writing was to look at how the mechanical structure of the game by design seems to encourage lone rangers out to score on the leaderboard for PvP, while encouraging teamwork on the PvE side.

Now, if I was a better writer, I would have also gotten across my thought that I’d like to see those mechanics modified, on both sides, to encourage both teamwork and solo skill with achievements/leaderboards that can measure group coordination and ‘best team players’ by name as well as the easy ones, “who got the most killing blows”.

Heck, I’d love to see a leaderboard that not only showed total amount a player healed during the BG, but also how many other players got heals, and what percentage of cast heals went to other players. I’d like to see total number of kill assists, that kind of thing. And I’d love to see some kind of proximity assist, where if you were close when the flag got capped, it counts you as assisting in flag capture so long as you were also in combat with others.

I’m just saying, yes the smart players like Gnomer don’t do it Jenkins style, but change the scoring and leaderboard system to encourage new players to see up front what is being valued after a battle.

A new player seeing the leaderboard, and wanting to do better, might think that what is valued is number of individual kills, and take a while to realise the deeper game being played.

Now if only Gnomer had ripped me a new one like this RIGHT after I did my post… ah, the flamewar we could have started. We might have shortstopped that whole ugly BRK vs Mages thing before it happened.

“You want to run some BGs with your mates… make sure you only have 4 mates, because Blizzard has now limited the the number of people that can join as a group to 5 – half a WSG, a 1/3 of an AB, SotA or EotS, and 1/8th of an AV or IoC.”

That’s actually false sir. You can que with as many people as you did before, the only limitation is that you cannot do randoms with more than 5 people.

“In fact it will be the only way to gain the mid-level rewards for PvP.”

Not so sir, the very same gear will be given to those who participate in rated battlegrounds.

—-
Right here, below my responses to Gnomer, once stood a very long and angry post about the assertions BBB made.

But since finishing it, I have deleted it, and would like to insert an imaginary rainbow to express how much better I feel and no longer feel angry.

[Imaginary Rainbow Here]

However, I will leave one piece because it is important:

[/rage]
BBB, I don’t have a single thing against you and hope that this ins’t misconstrued into something of that nature. But…

“Those are the core differences between PvP and PvE. The difference in emphasis on teamwork recognition versus individual excellence.”

That statement is laughable at best, and completely falsified and a simple act of trolling at worst. I metaphorically choke on the words while trying to spew out such bile. The fact that you are a relatively well know blogger is the only thing that has be not believing the latter.

You completely ignored the topic of arenas in your entire post. You put forward zero effort to be fair and impartial. There is no chance in hell you couldn’t have had arenas cross your mind a single time while writing that post. It only leaves me to question why it wasn’t ever discussed. The excuse that you dont have any experience or knowledge of arenas doesn’t fly; ignorance is not an excuse when your trying to make a persuasive post dealing with the very subject. This reminds me of an older Jim Carry movie, where he played a role of a lawyer who, under a spell couldn’t tell a single lie. I quote:

I tested this out the other day and I believe you can queue up to the size of the BG for everything except for AV & IOC, which for some stupid reason despite being the biggest ones only let you queue for 5. Which presumably is the limiting factor on only being able to do 5 for a random. YMMV but when I run premades on my server that’s what I run up against. *shrug*

Yeah I have heard a bit about how as long as two of you are in a group, that = premade, therefore prepare for a premade as opposition.

Interesting that the others allow larger teams.. I could understand if the random only allowed 10, being the smallest BG, but 5 quite simply sucks. I guess Blizz has less control over premade matching in the randoms.

Ahh I found one of the items that leads me to believe there will be 3 tiers of gear acquisition (I know there is a blue post out there somewhere too.. but, hey grabbed the one I could remember). This isn’t to say there will be 3 tiers of gear, just what you can access depends on the field of PvP you participate in.

The difference being currently that is BG vs Arena, in Cataclysm it will be “random BG vs. Organized BG, vs Arena.

I wrote a pretty long reply to this, but after reading it, I’m just gonna delete it. It’s not worth it.

1) If you’ve got a problem with what I wrote back then, way to go in not saying something about it to, you know, me personally. Bravo.

2) You’re not the only one that is pissed now, so grats twice over.

3) After reading my post, I can see that somehow I didn’t mention in there that when I was talking about PvP, I was talking about the way recognition of player performance was built into the game by Blizzard. I thought it was, and I know that i’ve talked about it before on my blog, that I really feel the leaderboard gives people the wrong idea when they try BGs for the first time.

Regardless… there is something so screwed up about people that read something and then go be douchebags about it somewhere else, talking trash without having the courtesy to actually, like, talk to the person they presumably have the problem with.

Screw it, if people want to read shit into what I say and rant about it and rage over it rather than post a comment to me or email me, that says more about them than it does about me.

To be clear, this was to Azryu, not Gnomer. Gnomer knows where I stand on this stuff, and has the courtesy when he reads something I say and gets pissed about it, to ask me and get my position clarified, since he knows that misunderstandings happen when you’re dealing with my writing. So, if he’s mad at me, it’s because I was stupid, and not some misunderstanding. :)

“1) If you’ve got a problem with what I wrote back then, way to go in not saying something about it to, you know, me personally. Bravo.”

I didn’t feel like it was necessary to contact you. Gnomer posted in reply to your post, and I put in my two cents. I have zero interesting in changing your mind, but I see completely though reading my comment that it seems I do. I should have put the [/endrage] after the part asking if I got anything wrong. My mistake.

“2) You’re not the only one that is pissed now, so grats twice over”

I don’t see the relevance as to whether other people are mad. I was venting my frustrations

“Regardless… there is something so screwed up about people that read something and then go be douchebags about it somewhere else”

Just for clearification, I was not looking for your input really, otherwise I would have put in on your post. Really the arguments presented left me with a need to vent, that is all. Again, as i said in a comment immediately after I sent that in, I should have revised it so it no longer expressed so much seething wrath.

This topic triggers me especially because as an ex guild officer and now fulltime PvP’er, I see what both sides to. It’s ridiculous how stupid some of the arguments are. I read through your article having read gnomer’s, so I went it with an expectation of what I’d find and as you pointed out derived the wrong meaning from some of your text, because of those preconceived notions of what I’d find. So for that I’m sorry. It’s hours later and now I really don’t care anymore. The fact that it is an uneditable comment is the only reason that you should have read it in it’s current state.

I suppose I should send this to your profile since this is specifically addressed to you, but I imagine you are still lurking here, recent events considered.

So here it is:
I apologize for raging, again, and I pinky promise to not do it again.

However, it’s so rare an opportunity to disagree with BearoftheBiggestButt, that I started writing this post… (I can’t always be fawning.. ok) and as I have mentioned elsewhere, it would have rotted away in drafts if not for our teasing of each other – and the non-BBB issue of other people’s perspective on PvP being a solo Gnome’s game.

edit: It has been so long since the original post that I forgot he clarified immediately – otherwise I would have put it in the post… I just remembered then.

Yea I don’t read his blog due to the nature of it being a class I don’t play, and was not aware of said article either. However, I did try to find one. I clicked on the tag “PvP” and the only post newer than the one in question is some post about druid pvp resources.

But then he never professed to be a PVPer or commentator on PvP. Rather he was reflecting on what can be an awful week for PVPers and PvEers alike.

I retain my right to talk about Bears with scorn (even though I have only tanked once in bear form, under duress, and was immediately relieved of my duties), though I doubt BBB would be the one I was referring too… unless of course he was trying to shove a sharp pointy object up my.. blog… In which case it would be with good humor and while returned with a Fireball.. there would be a big smiley on it :-)

Yea upon rereading that segment I left in there, I really should have revise it and toned it down. My seething rage still exists in such a potent way that my disclaimer about not taking this personally, I fear, may not be enough.

…and now you sound like me after reading my draft for the 1st time… thus my delay in posting it.

Remember BBB’s post did occur at that blighted period of time called “Children’s week”, a week when everyones frustration was epic and it is easy to understand where BBB might have made a slip of the keyboard and I could have made a STFU slip of the reading comprehension.

Anyway, love between my readers and Hunter’s pets is not only acceptable, but encouraged. ;-)

I will be honest though, running BG’s during that week was not only fun but also very stressful. The people that had no idea how to control their character in the battlefield did make me smirk a few times, like a warlock with their felhunter’s spell lock set to autofire. I got a few giggles but damn it was annoying in EOTS when everyone was trying to run the flag…

My rage left ample amounts of energy and desire to write. Had you seen the huge ass post I had going before I reduced it to just that segment, you’d think that I was about to throw my keyboard at the wall ;)

There is one thing I would like to say about the importance of “heroes” in bg’s: they are useful in some circumstances. They can be unknowing leaders, or provide motivation or inspiration to the rest of the group. Take, for example, an AB where alliance is getting graveyard camped with no nodes. Many people would just give up, but a rogue who sneaks out alone to take a base could inspire others to do the same, and change the tide of the battle. (I know this isn’t the greatest example, since having no bases results in a very swift loss, but you can get the idea).

Of course, the “hero” being game changing is very circumstantial, and usually doesn’t win games; but don’t forget that it occasionally does ;)

There is always a place for heroes, even in PvE.. when the Mage or Hunter (or whatever), kites the extra mobs that get pulled, or get out of control – hero.

The same in BGs.. and I know I have done heroic roles in BGs before, sometimes as banal as calling encouragement, or incomings, other times ninja capping bases, or holding a base against multiple opponents.

The thing is, any one will tell you 50% heroes, 50% afk wont win a game (well maybe it will during childrens week).. it is a team effort.

The only time that Rogue ninja capping a base wins a game, is if others are then inspired and follow suite, and it does happen.

But in reality that hero is just doing what should have been done, they are doing their job while the remainder of the team aren’t.

[…] Gnomer wrote a great post earlier in the weekend about PvP, quoted one of my old posts where I’d pissed him off, and one of the earliest comments left there was someone pointing out, correctly, that the BBB doesn’t know anything about PvP, but that doesn’t stop me from talking about it. […]

[…] about individual accomplishments, not team play. Gnomeaggedon touched on this in his recent post There is no “I” in “PvP”, and BBB commented on it during Children’s Week, just to start with — but every time you […]

My suggestion would be to enable friendly fire for both sides on a battleground and give them a set number of lives. That would solve all problems in a battleground. You don’t like some guy sitting there doing nothing well 20 guys guarding the flag keeper all aim with a white damage attack boom he’s gone. Besides it always pissed me off as a warlock if I could dot my own team and the enemy team I could solo the entire other faction, its just ridiculous really.